What free or open source tools are you using on small to medium scale projects to help you noodle out your thoughts into design and architecture?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/ExperiencedDevs
Editors Plantuml Productivity Notion Atom

SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
surveyjs.io
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InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
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  • excalidraw

    Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams

    • https://excalidraw.com/ for a whiteboard with collaboration support

  • C4-PlantUML

    C4-PlantUML combines the benefits of PlantUML and the C4 model for providing a simple way of describing and communicate software architectures

    • this?

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

    SurveyJS logo

  • notion-auto-pull

    Bash script to automatically download a notion workspace

    • When I'm ready to start putting it together, I either keep it low-tech and just write things up in a text editor (I like atom), or lately I've been really enjoying Notion as well. Lot of flexibility, can embed stuff like excalidraw diagrams directly in the page.

  • Atom

    Discontinued :atom: The hackable text editor

    • When I'm ready to start putting it together, I either keep it low-tech and just write things up in a text editor (I like atom), or lately I've been really enjoying Notion as well. Lot of flexibility, can embed stuff like excalidraw diagrams directly in the page.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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